Infraestructura software de soporte al desarrollo de interfaces de usuario plásticas bajo una visión dicotómica

Resumo

In a society clearly infuenced by new technologies, new advances in mobile computing have supposed a tremendous change in the habits of interaction with systems and access to an information that is undergoing omnipresent. For one thing, any environment can become a potential scenario for carrying out interactive tasks, even in collaboration with other users, and without renouncing mobility. Furthermore, applications tend to other col- laborative features, either for social or performance reasons. Today, ubiquity in interaction is a laudable fact. This scenario introduces the need for contributing software solutions that tackle the diversity factor in the context of use. Although the techniques developed up to now in the Human-Computer Interaction discipline provide a solid foundation, these aspects have not been covered in an altogether satisfactory way. A flexible, comprehensive and systematic support for the design and execution of user interfaces able to adapt themselves to the situations likely to arise during interaction is required. It is precisely this flexibility to support diferent types of variations in the context of use without neglecting usability that defines the plasticity of the user interface concept. In the study of this issue, two well-defined problems appear: (a) the increasing com- plexity in the design of these kinds of interfaces; and (b) an increasing demand for dynamic and evolving adaptation. This work proposes the separate study of these two challenges, which are characterized by means of two sub-concepts of plasticity called explicit plasticity and implicit plasticity respectively. The approach based on this division, which delimits the problem solution space, receives the name of Dichotomic View of Plasticity", and it lays the foundations of this work. The dichotomic view combines two diferent types of engines that are located on the opposite sides of a client-server architecture. Following the same terminology, these engines are called respectively Explicit Plasticity Engine, which users support to both the design and development of plastic and group-aware user interfaces and the maintenance of shared- knowledge; and Implicit Plasticity Engine, which is able to detect the environment and react appropriately under a pre-established set of circumstances, among them those related to the work in group. The inclusion of the group conditions in the context of use and the plasticity process turns out to be innovative and it opens a way of dealing with plasticity and the problems intrinsic to collaborative scenarios in a combined manner.